Float Page 8

  “I have a very narrow comfort zone, too,” Duncan said, trying to push back against the chair, held firmly in place by Slocum.

  “What is this?” asked Osbert. With his fork he poked at the eel head arranged on top of his wedge of pie, looking at a piece of star-shaped pastry nearby. A sharp little tongue of pimento stuck out from between its circle of teeth.

  “The eel is gazing at the stars,” said Slocum. “That’s why it’s called starry gazey.” He touched the eel head on Duncan’s plate. “They’re closely related to humans. That round mouth? He uses it to attach to his prey and suck the life out of it.” Slocum opened his mouth and made a perfect round just like the eel’s. “There aren’t many species with round mouths, but we’re one of them.”

  With this disturbing thought, he picked up Osbert’s empty bowl and left Duncan’s full one, as if he still expected him to eat it. Duncan glanced longingly at an order of fried clams and onion rings at the next table and wondered why, if Slocum could produce such reliable, tasty fare, he continued to experiment with odd ingredients and complex techniques, reaching for some elusive goal. Slocum was still standing behind them, looking out the window, transfixed by the waterfront, where lobster boats swayed at their berths and cranes pointed to the sky. “We should all gaze at the stars now and again,” he said, before heading back to the kitchen.

  “Do you believe, Leland, that a man’s crust is formed at an early age?”

  Duncan watched as Osbert cut into his pie as meticulously as a surgeon.

  “Or do you think change is always possible? Do you think, for instance, that you could stop pondering your own mortality long enough to consider actually living?”

  Before Duncan could open his mouth, the little bell on the restaurant door tinkled and, with a blast of wind off the water, in walked Syrie. She shook her hair free of her chiffon scarf, and the small dog under her arm shook its head as well. Syrie’s face glowed when she saw Duncan. He was surprised and a little frightened. He could still feel the smooth touch of her foot on his at the Club. It had brought back vivid memories of their past physical relationship, which had been fiery in a way that only youth could have fueled. This made him worry in a whole new way about his marriage. He missed Cora. He wished she would call. He wanted to go home.

  “There she is!” said Osbert, half standing as she approached the table. “Syrie, I’m afraid I’ve scheduled back-to-belly appointments today, and I’m not quite done with Mr. Leland. Sit and charm us with your company.”

  At this Syrie laughed with a shake of her shoulders. “Back to belly. That sounds intriguing, doesn’t it, Duncan?” She wore tight black pants and a blue silk cardigan with buttons in the form of seashells, clothes meant to attract attention to the body, so very different from how Cora dressed, in a style that could best be described as mismatched. Sneakers with skirts, sweaters with shorts, reds with oranges, and plaids with anything at all. Hats with everything. And yet, the package as a whole worked, even at her office, where she threw a thin shawl over her shoulders and looked like the wise and patient therapist she was known to be.

  Duncan stood up uneasily, causing his fetid soup to slosh out of its bowl and onto the table. He threw a few paper napkins on the spill. Densch, pushed by Slocum from behind, came running over with another chair for Syrie, and they all sat down. Osbert returned to his lunch.

  “Eel pie?” asked Duncan, edging his plate toward her.

  “Thank you, no,” she said, leaning away, clutching her dog to her bosom. “I don’t eat parasites.”

  Duncan stared at his plate. The eel stared back at him, with its round human mouth, so he picked it up to turn its face away, but when he saw that the neck was a hollow socket, he could not resist. He forced it over his right index finger, then began to speak in an eely voice as he flexed his finger. “Help! Help! Global warming is making me ill!”

  Osbert stared at him for a moment with what Duncan thought was a glimmer of a smile, but no. Osbert suddenly leaned over and yanked the head off Duncan’s finger and flicked it across the room, where it skidded to a dark corner. If people hadn’t been watching them before, they certainly were now. “Don’t play with your food, Leland.”

  Duncan stared at him. If he let him get away with this bullying now, it would never end. He was still the boss—Osbert was only a potential investor. “Don’t tell me what to do,” said Duncan, and he reached over to Osbert’s plate and took his eel head and put it on his finger.

  “You must behave like a man of business, Leland,” said Osbert, barely moving his lips when he talked. “Or you are wasting everyone’s time.”

  “The oceans are heating up! Eels are dying, I’m dying … ” said Duncan, letting his voice trail off as the eel head drooped on his finger. He smiled at Osbert as he removed his finger puppet and put it in his jacket pocket to keep him from taking it back.

  “I’ll wait next door at the coffee shop,” said Syrie, standing. “It doesn’t seem like you two are finished with your discussion.”

  “It’s quite all right, my sweet,” said Osbert, reaching for her elbow to pull her back down to her seat. “As Churchill said, ‘I like a man who grins when he fights.’” Then he returned to eating as if nothing had happened, but Duncan knew that blood would stay in the water.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Syrie.

  “Osbert is financing my expansion.” She used her wrist to push back a wisp of blonde hair.

  He wondered why Syrie had warned him about Osbert if she was ready to do business with him herself, but that was not something they could talk about in front of him. “Osbert certainly has his finger in quite a few pies,” said Duncan.

  Osbert turned to Syrie. “The Seacrest’s pie, too,” he said. “We’ve just agreed in principle.” He went back to eating without even looking at Duncan, and in the following silence the deal was done. Duncan had neither agreed nor disagreed but had let the deal wash over him.

  “I was just talking to Chief Lovasco,” said Syrie, stretching her feet under the table, causing Duncan to twist his body away. “He says they’ve confirmed that the foot the racers found on Saturday belongs to Marsilio.”

  “Belonged,” corrected Duncan, and he looked over at the kitchen. Slocum would shed no tears for the man, who was known to be unfaithful to his sister.

  “DNA come in?” asked Osbert, finally moving his plate aside and wiping his lips with his napkin.

  “No,” she said, pausing to scrunch her face up. “His head was pulled up in a flounder net this morning.”

  Duncan felt ill. “In the water all week and still identifiable? Not eaten away?”

  “Dental records, I’m sure,” said Osbert. “Teeth are tenacious little bastards.”

  “They’re trying to figure out if he died during the storm … or not,” said Syrie, as she played with the tiny edge of cobweb lace on her collar. “It seems the foot was sawed off at the ankle, not snapped off by a propeller.”

  “They used to tell the time of drownings by when the watches stopped,” said Duncan, “but they’re all waterproof now.”

  “He wasn’t wearing a watch,” said Osbert.

  “How do you know that?” asked Duncan.

  There was a dark silence during which Osbert picked up his cigar and put it back in its case. “It’s what the man’s wife told the police. It was in the paper. You do read, don’t you? Or do you just play with eel heads?” He took his napkin off his lap and retrieved his stick. He turned to Syrie and gestured at the wall with it. “Shall we go next door for coffee?”

  Syrie stood up by way of an answer and shook her clothes back in place.

  Osbert rose like an iceberg. “I’ll settle lunch on my way out, Duncan, and I’ll have papers sent over later today for you to look at. They’re all made up.”

  All made up. Their partnership was not five minutes old, and Duncan hated him already. He stood to shake hands, and it felt like holding a mackerel. Syrie leaned across the table and kissed Duncan on the che
ek. He felt her tongue on his skin, and then he felt it slide to his lips, which made him jerk back, bumping the table and spilling more of the soup. Syrie turned and flounced to the door, laughing to herself. He noticed one or two people turning their heads to look at them, and he quickly busied himself sopping up the soup. When he peeled away the thick layer of napkins, the varnish came off with it.

  He stared at Osbert’s perfectly suited back at the cashier’s station by the door. Osbert removed a roll of bills from his pocket like plunder and was beginning to count out the money when he suddenly pitched forward and grabbed the counter. His walking stick fell to the ground with a loud clatter. Duncan could not see Osbert’s expression, but he could guess. Right now, the soup must be burning through the lining of his stomach.

  “Osbert!” Syrie shouted as he dropped to the floor, knees first, then forehead, before folding up on himself completely. The dog barked.

  Slocum and the staff came running out from the kitchen. Marney called 911 on her cell phone, then stood next to Duncan, shaking. He held up his bowl. “Could I get some of this soup to go?” he asked, and she looked at him as if he had two heads. Off in the distance they heard the first siren. Slocum threw open the door to wave them down, and a wall of wind pushed into the restaurant, blowing Osbert’s wad of ten-dollar bills around the room in a storm of money.

  seven

  The contract landed on Duncan’s desk later that afternoon, as promised, even while Osbert was still in the hospital having his stomach pumped.

  “For your viewing pleasure.” Beaky bowed from the hips, and as he bent forward his ferret slid off his shoulder and leaped to the desk. Duncan took a swipe, and it was gone in a flurry of fur. The air was heavily perfumed with ferret musk.

  “I’ve got to hand it to Fingers,” said Duncan. “It takes a lot of B.O. to overpower rotting fish.” He cracked open the window and was instantly fixated by the blinding glare of the sun on the water. A trawler made a black shape against the light as it pulled into Petersen’s Marina, surrounded by a white mist of gulls that had followed it in from the sea.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” said Beaky.

  “Yes,” said Duncan, not expecting someone like Beaky to appreciate the beauty of anything other than money. “No need to wait. It’s going to take a while.”

  Beaky picked up the ferret from the floor. “It would be a shame if all the pretty fishing boats started to disappear just because you won’t sign the contract.”

  Beaky tucked Fingers in his jacket pocket and turned away. Duncan listened to his retreating steps on the stairs that led down to the factory floor, and above the din of the machinery he heard Beaky call up to him. “Leland! You have until tomorrow!”

  Duncan started humming “Tomorrow” from Annie. Maybe he’d build a playlist around it for the factory. Then his problems would be over because they’d lock him up. He felt a strong pull to the window but resisted the urge and sat down at his desk, determined to tackle the contract. He arranged the manila envelope in the exact center of his desk. DUNCAN LELAND was penciled with precision on the envelope. He touched the “D” with the tip of his finger. The lead point had dug in deeply, like engraving on a tombstone. He pulled the contract out of its envelope and let his eyes wash over the words, which were typed in an unusual, severe font, but his brain could not process the information they were meant to convey. The more he focused, the more the words floated beyond his grasp, drifting about his mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship. Everything—the lines and paragraphs, the subheadings and punctuation, even the page numbers—seemed like sad, isolated units yearning to join together in some grand design. And yet they composed a peculiar beauty that made him forget for a moment his agonized situation. He felt he was in one of those modern art museums Cora used to bring him to, where he understood nothing but left changed in spite of himself.

  She was always so good for him that way, exposing him to the new and unusual, asking him to see the world with fresh goggles. She was a native New Yorker, a single Upper West Side child raised by her divorced mom, who’d become a therapist after Cora’s dad abandoned them both to find fulfillment on an ashram in California in the late seventies. Cora had been finishing her own master’s of social work degree at NYU when she met Duncan on campus. He was there to recruit students for lab experiments at Revlon. He gave her a bag of free makeup samples, and they became inseparable. She introduced him to foreign movies, exotic food, obscure books, alternative music, and other cultural goodies. Gift baskets for his brain, she called them, as if she were fattening up his intellect for marriage.

  And what did she get out of their marriage other than managing his anxieties? She hadn’t even gotten a baby, though she often told him how grateful she was that he’d brought her to live by the sea, so fully immersed in the natural world, so different from the one she grew up in. They were a good match that way, she’d said—she brought urban culture to the marriage; he brought the water. But now that she lived here, maybe there was nothing left for him to do.

  “Enough.” He shook off this dangerous heading and got down to business. He read what he could manage of the contract, then faxed a copy to Mallory Cole’s law office and called to ask him to do a quick once-over. While he waited for him to respond, he stood at the open window and breathed in deeply. Next door was Petersen’s Marina, which did not cater to the yachting crowd as other marinas in town did but serviced the commercial fleet, supplying ice and diesel and doing complete haul-outs. It had always been in a state of picturesque decay but lately seemed to be in unromantic decline, surrounded as it was by rotting pilings and sinking floats. At the dock, two pleasure fishing boats were in line to be pulled for the winter. It was not exactly a rush. Usually in September boat owners were clamoring to get out of the water before a nor’easter did the job for them, but last spring many of them couldn’t afford to put their boats in for the season. So much unemployment, and yet no one could enjoy their free time. He watched Bear Petersen, grandson of the founder, supervise a lobster boat being run up on the ways to have her bottom scrubbed. The hull, dripping with water, was thick with sea vegetation and barnacles, and the boat seemed to groan with world weariness as it settled into its cradle. He wondered if Bear, who sometimes relaxed in a dress and heels in private, ever felt trapped in the family business. He wondered if the cross-dressing was a way of accepting it and rejecting it at the same time. He’d asked Cora what she thought about it once, and she’d only shrugged. “It fills a need.”

  He looked at his watch. “Come on, Mallory, call back already.” Since he could not calm his mind with the view, he rifled through the bookshelf for something to distract him. Among the faded vinyl binders of maritime regulations, he found his father’s old copy of The Little Prince. He let the book fall open in his hands, to a passage that was underlined twice: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

  His father used to read those words aloud to him, preparing him for when he’d be running the business. But he never went into specifics. How did one go about making an employee long for fertilizer? When the telephone rang, he picked up the receiver, which was redolent of fish, and he had to pry a hardened whiting scale from the plastic. He wondered if Annuncia had been poking around in his office again.

  “Duncan,” said Mallory, with barely suppressed laughter. “Rescue any gulls lately?”

  “This week I’m just trying to save myself.”

  Mallory cleared his throat and put on a lawyerly voice. “Basically it says here that the garbage company can make unlimited deliveries of nitrogenous materials—at night—in exchange for a loan sufficient to carry Seacrest’s through the next six months. If at the end of that time Seacrest’s is unable to repay the principal, the company will be transferred to Osbert.”

  Duncan took off his glasses. “You know how it is around here. Should I sign it?” />
  “Depends on how desperate you are. There are a lot of risks. You’ll have more processing and maybe more profit, but only if you can actually sell the new mix to the public. Would people really want to spread other people’s garbage on their gardens?”

  “Would I have to tell them what it was?”

  Mallory whistled. “Maybe there’s some wiggle-room in the truth-in-labeling laws.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll have marketing come up with some other word for ‘garbage.’”

  “One more thing,” said Mallory. “On page three, near the bottom? I’d get rid of that ‘death clause’ if I were you. Never get yourself in a situation where you’re worth more to an investor dead than alive.”

  “True that,” said Duncan. He’d seen the clause, a disturbing little proviso that Seacrest’s would go to Osbert if something happened to Duncan—something like death. “I’ll talk to him and call you back later.”

  “Screech!” said Mallory, in a bad imitation of a seagull, before hanging up in laughter.

  Duncan dialed Osbert’s cell phone number slowly, as if he were moving through mud.

  “Leland,” said Osbert, answering his phone himself, sounding as crisp as ever in his hospital bed. “Have you signed?”

  “My lawyer says I have to cross out the death clause.”

  “Bosh,” said Osbert. “It’s all boilerplate, a standard inclusion to prevent you from killing yourself in order to keep the factory in family hands. What are you leaning on your lawyer for? You’re the boss—you can do what you want.”

  “I can’t do what I want because I don’t know what I want.”

  “You do know,” said Osbert. “Go deeper. The answer is there. Live, Leland—take a chance. Don’t be afraid until you have to be. Beaky will pick up those papers tomorrow at noon.”

  Osbert hung up. After a few moments in which Duncan did not quite know where he was, he slid the unsigned contract back into the envelope and closed the metal clasp. He needed another opinion. If things fell apart and he lost the business to Osbert, he didn’t want all the blame to fall on him. He slumped back in his chair and listened to Playlist #18 (early Stones and late Beatles, including some Sergeant Pepper) before locking up the office. Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden” continued to echo in his brain, and he made a mental note to delete that song from the list. If he did not solve his company’s financial situation, he would soon have plenty of time for projects like fine-tuning his music. It was about a week’s worth of work, which was as far into the future as he could plan. Beyond that be sea monsters, as the ancient cartographers used to say when the world was small and flat.